This is a bit of a strange episode. It’s an attempt to explore the difficulty of everything we’re supposed to feel in a day. We’re in a time when to open the news is to expose yourself to horrors — ones that are a world away, others that are growing ever closer, or perhaps have already made landfall in our lives. And then many of us look up from our screens into a normal spring day. What do you do with that?But that’s not new or exceptional. It’s the human condition. It exists for all of us, and it always has: life intermingling with death, grief coexisting with joy. Kathryn Schulz’s memoir, “Lost & Found,” is all about this experience — the core of her book isn’t losing a parent or finding a life partner. It’s the “and” that connects them both. How do we hold all that we have to hold, all at once? How do we not feel overwhelmed, or emotionally numbed? I found this to be a beautiful conversation. But it’s also a conversation — particularly at the beginning — about loss and grief. That was the part that felt truest to me, and so I hope noting it doesn’t warn you off. But I wanted to note it. Book Recommendations:A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary MantelSpent by Alison BechdelWho Is Government? Edited by Michael LewisThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.htmlThis episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to the Talbot County Free Library. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What are the challenges of holding multiple emotions at once?
I don't know how to hold all the feelings, even all the thoughts I should have in a day right now. The emergency is here and the kids need help with their homework. I have friends who have fallen terribly ill and others who have just seen their test results come back clear. I spend days covering efforts to rip healthcare from people and torch the global economy.
And then I'm supposed to go to a birthday party. I look down at my phone at smoldering ruins in Ukraine and Gaza and Sudan, and then I look up into a spring day. I know on some level this is always true, that we are just more or less alive to it at different times.
But I guess I'm feeling more alive to it right now, more overwhelmed by it right now, more curious about how to keep myself open to it right now. And then I ran into this unusually beautiful book that's all about this experience. It's called Lost and Found. It's by Katherine Schultz, a writer at The New Yorker. And it's structured around a loss, that of her father.
around a finding, that of finding and falling in love with her partner. And then it's this really moving meditation on the way it's all connected. The way that we, quote, live with both at once, with many things at once, everything connected to its opposite, everything connected to everything. It seemed worth a conversation. Katherine Schultz, welcome to the show.
Chapter 2: How does loss and grief shape our understanding of life?
I'm delighted to be here. Thanks so much.
I want to start by having you tell me a bit about your father. Where did he come from?
What a wonderful question to begin with, because it has these kind of two valences, the practical matter of where he came from and the kind of mystifying question of where any human being and all their wonderful specificity comes from. In the case of my father, both answers are a little complicated. His mother had fled the shtetl in Poland when it was clear that the shadow of the
Second World War was kind of creeping ever further across Poland. She came from a family of 12. They had the resources to get one of them to safety, and they chose their youngest daughter, who was my grandmother, and indeed her parents. And most of her siblings subsequently perished in Auschwitz. So she gets herself to Tel Aviv. My father is born.
And then at a very young age, he was sent away from his mother. He was sent to live on a kibbutz and spent a few years alone there. His father vanishes or dies. We don't know. My grandmother remarries. And after the war, their family in a truly unusual trajectory when half of global Jewry in its terrible decimated and refugee status is trying to get to the Holy Land.
My father and his family flee Tel Aviv and go of all places in the world to Germany. So my father left Tel Aviv at about seven, spent from seven to 12 in Germany, and then finally the family obtained refugee visas and wound up in Detroit, which is where he then spent his teenage years.
You have a beautiful passage about your father being on the boat, coming to America, and trying to conceive of how much turmoil and loss he had already experienced. Tell me a bit about how much dislocation he'd seen before the age of 12.
Just shocking amounts, really. I mean, my father was born in 1941, so all around him, what should have been whole vast branches of family trees are just being hewn off viciously, and whole communities are being leveled and destroyed. So there was this kind of background dislocation attendant upon every Jew born in that
But then quite specifically, you know, he was born essentially a stranger in a strange land. In 1948, when my father's family left Israel, or I should say left Palestine, it was still Palestine, it was effectively a war zone.
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Chapter 3: What does Kathryn Schulz say about her father's life experiences?
There was a kind of omnipresent violence and insecurity that characterized his young life that is just shocking for me to contemplate, in part because he then dedicated his adult life to providing for his children the stability he did not have growing up.
I read stories like this, and I've been reading Melting Point, which is a different sort of very interesting kaleidoscopic history of this era for Jewish people. But I was also reading Wolf Hall, where everybody's endlessly dying of tuberculosis. I think of the modesty of the things I try to protect my children from now, the things that upset me if it happens to them.
And then what, you know, every generation of humanity, including many people alive today, the extremism of the experience. And it's hard to imagine how you go through that and just keep going. And yet people did and do. So this is a person who's, I mean, he's watched his uncle get murdered in the car next to him. What kind of person does he become?
My father became the kind of person who you would never guess the quantity of tragedy that lay in his past. You would never guess that his whole family had been decimated by the Holocaust, that he had all of this grief and loss and violence at every stage of his life. My father was brilliant. He was joyful. He was incredibly witty. He was shockingly brilliant.
And my dad spoke, I think, eight languages. But basically, English was the last of his many languages. And I like to think I'm a reasonably articulate person and my father could talk me out of the table. I mean, he just was beautifully gifted with languages. And I guess, fundamentally generous of spirit.
You know, his response to the privations of his life were to live as generous a life as he could, both with material means, but also with his joy, with his intellect, with his energy, his happiness lay in sharing it with the world.
Do you understand his temperament as an act of denial or an act of acceptance?
What an interesting question. I've never been asked it before. I suppose I understand his temperament mostly as a great gift. And I'm not trying to deny my father credit he deserves. I know my father made a great many decisions about the kind of life he wanted to live and the kind of man he wanted to be, including in ways that changed over the course of my life.
I saw him actively become a more patient man. Patience did not naturally run strong in him, nor in me, for that matter. And I saw him make choices about equilibrium and patience. But I think in some fundamental way, I don't think my father was ever in denial about the experiences that shaped him. He didn't speak about them in great detail until I was myself an adult. But he certainly never...
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Chapter 4: How do we balance attention between personal joys and global tragedies?
It's so funny. Is it a more honest perspective of the world? It is certainly accurate by many lights. Loss is omnipresent. We will die. The people we love will die. The things we build in the grand scheme of things, even in the medium scheme of things, are relatively transient and fleeting.
There are times in life when the omnipresence and the scale of this loss do become profoundly visible to us, at least to me. I think a lot about scale, right? And if you dwell on the scale of the world, let alone the scale of the cosmos... Our lives are stunningly short. They seem or can seem stunningly insignificant. And this sense that everything around us is terrifyingly fragile is accurate.
You can't look at the grand sweep of things and not realize how tenuous our foothold in this world is and how quickly we will be not merely lost, but forgotten. You know, I had this arresting moment when I realized, you know, I'm I can barely tell you my great-grandparents' names. I mean, that is three generations, right? That is the blink of an eye. But so it goes.
And everything we love, everyone we love, we are going to have to confront just the devastating loss of literally all of them. That's the bleak version, you know, and it's real. I don't think it's the whole story. There are ways to try to hold the bifocal vision of that kind of loss and why our lives are nonetheless not insignificant or at least not meaningless.
But certainly, you know, in hard moments, and I think for people who struggle with depression or who have a truly unfair burden of grief in their lives, it can seem like the only truth about existence.
You call it bleak, and there's a dimension of it where it is very bleak and very frightening. And then also the people I know who abide in it Often, I don't want to say they don't find it bleak, but they also describe a certain beauty that comes from the noticing of it.
A friend of mine who lost his mother not long ago always tells me with some real sadness that time doesn't heal wounds, it makes just everything fade. And that I've sort of watched him grieve the diminishment of his grief more. And that there was a sort of a beauty in seeing things as they more really were, the sort of interconnection of life, the fragility of it.
I think one reason we turn away from these things is it feels annihilating to look at them, but then the people I know who are looking at them, there's a kind of connection to something very profound that seems to abide there as well.
Oh, no question about it. I mean, grief is just an amazing lens. I mean, its capacity for sharp focus is incredible. And it is true that there were moments in the depths of grieving or preparing to grieve my father that the world had never seemed so beautiful to me or so much like a gift. And there's a reason we...
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Chapter 5: What insights can grief provide about the beauty of life?
Absolutely. I mean, I think, look, I mean, even the monks are not that monkish, right? I mean, there's a wonderful body of literature about distraction, you know, in these spaces that are supposed to be sanctuaries from all the pressures of the outside world and focus the mind. And, you know, you're meant to just think purely about God.
And if it were easy, we would all be monks and the monks would be better at being monks. It's incredibly difficult.
And they usually don't have kids.
And they don't have kids, right, which are appropriately, I would never say a distraction. They are the essence. They are the thing we are meant to be paying the most attention to. And sometimes that attention is profound and existential. And sometimes it's like, you know, sweetheart, go put your underwear on. It's just like a lot of parenting is just pragmatics, right?
I don't know that we should aspire, or I suppose we should aspire to be in touch with the beauty and wonderful givenness of every moment. Aspiration does not actually have to be reality.
Like I think aspiring probably is why three and a half percent of the time we have the transcendent experience of like, here I am like curled up in bed with my daughter, reading her a bedtime story and nothing will ever be so profoundly sweet as this. And you feel it deep inside you and you know you will always retain it. And the other 97% of the time you won't.
probably okay you know the amazing thing about these moments of awe at the universe at life at what we have is they are so potent you don't actually need that many of them so i don't think you can give up the goal of trying to have more of them or recognize them but i don't think we need that many of them to kind of sustain our souls
So since finishing the writing of the book, you've had two children.
That's right.
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Chapter 6: How do our experiences shape our attention to life's fragility?
for finding and bringing you whatever is going to most upset you that is happening literally anywhere on earth at that exact moment. And It's not that it's not on some level good to know about it. I don't want to go to the point where we never knew about it.
But I often think that probably the healthy medium was to be able to pick up a newspaper once a day and find out about terrible things happening elsewhere and important things happening elsewhere and sometimes wonderful things, but less often wonderful things happening elsewhere. As opposed to be with your kids in the park and your phone buzzes
And it's just something terrible that you cannot affect. It's not even happening to anybody you know. You definitely don't have power over it. But somebody somewhere thought it would grab you to know about it. And it's strange. It both makes you aware of suffering, but also I think it has some kind of other quality, some numbing and exhausting quality that is not healthy enough.
I think that's almost certainly true. I mean, it's so interesting. You said you were reading Melting Point and there's an arresting moment in there when one of the sources in the book who we're hearing from talks about how, you know, you used to read one newspaper and you'd get 20 minutes of news in the evening or maybe you'd get 10 minutes of newsreels before a movie and that was it.
And I put down the book when I read that. I thought about it for a long time because, I mean, there was not a shortage of news in the world. This was in the middle of the Second World War. And she goes on to say something I found equally arresting and highly related, which is the world seemed much bigger and more mysterious than...
So I think you're right, although I also think it's a little bit more complicated than that because in this kind of tragic way, I feel like we simultaneously know more about the world and less about our own communities in a certain sense. Oh, yeah. bits of news from all over, much of it tragic, some of it just inflammatory for a deep and connected knowledge of our own immediate communities.
And that does feel tragic and upsetting to me. And this kind of absolute flattening of distinctions. So
I wanna ask you about happiness.
And I'd like to do that by asking you to read a short passage from your book, which is on page 174. Sure.
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Chapter 7: What wisdom can we gain from recognizing our mortality?
And in the middle of doing so, he, in this kind of odd way, sort of shifts metaphors and starts talking about the thoughts in our minds as birds flying around. And sometimes they're flying and sometimes they're perched somewhere.
And he says, you know, we only ever really pay attention to the places they perch, which in his mind is like, you know, the nouns and the verbs and the adjectives, like the really obvious things. Like Ezra Klein, you're a noun, you're a bird perched somewhere. We can talk about Ezra Klein or, you know, we can talk about a rainstorm or a word like red. It feels like it has content for us.
So there's all this stuff that happens when the birds are flying around, which is the and and the if and the or, these kind of subtle but absolutely crucial elements of our thought that we don't pay attention to and yet profoundly shape what we're able to think and what we think about and the way that we think.
He says, you know, there should be a feel of and just as much as we have a sense of a feel for blue or cold or Ezra Klein. And that was incredibly helpful to me because I thought, oh, yeah, that's kind of what I'm here to do. I'm here to try to figure out what's the feeling of and. Like, what is this idea? What is this word doing for us?
And what's the role that it plays in language, which is a different way of saying what's the role that it plays in how we think?
Did you feel like you came to an answer to that? What is the feel of and?
So a little bit in distinction from every other conjunction that the English language has, you know, but, if, or, all of those actually describe a kind of necessary relationship. If this, then that. That's a causal relationship. It actually tells us something about the two halves of the sentence we're creating. The beautiful thing about and is you can stick any two things together with it.
They can have absolutely no relationship to each other. I give you apples and oranges, right? Or they can have every relationship to each other, Romeo and Juliet. or none on earth, you know, crab apples and tuxedos.
And this morning, what we're dealing with is like, we have 30 minutes to get dressed and get to the library to do a podcast with Ezra Klein and our nephew who's at our house, who's two and a half, just vomited in the crib, which means there's nowhere for him to sleep. And also, whoops, I'm ignoring a note from my editor and I need to go to the grocery store. I mean, this is life, right?
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Chapter 8: How can moments of awe sustain our souls?
It's about the experience of growing up in a relatively hardscrabble family and living this kind of marginal artistic existence and then suddenly finding yourself reasonably well off. And it's very adjacent to these questions we've been discussing of, well, How do you enjoy your life and your money and also live your values and interact with your community?
And it's very smart on the questions of what we do with our money and our money and our morals. And it's also just riotously funny as all of her work is. So that's number two. And number three is a book I think I've heard you talk about as well, also a relatively new book.
And I'm partly shouting out my partner here because she was involved in the Michael Lewis Project, who is government, which is this collection of essays by these wildly different writers about government bureaucrats, which at the time that I first heard about it, I was like, I don't really know how well a book about bureaucrats an anthology of essays about government bureaucrats is going to do.
And tragically, it met the moment. And I can't think of a better thing for people to be reading right now than these, I found just incredibly moving stories about what these alleged agents of the deep state are actually doing with their time and doing on behalf of the American people. So those are my three recommendations for you.
Katherine Schultz, thank you very much.
Absolutely my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Gelb, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassione, Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobel, Kristen Lin, and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker.
Audience strategy by Christina Samielewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Talbot County Free Library.
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